No one will deny that Peter Singer can provoke. Most recently, in The Life You Can Save, Singer lays out a utilitarian argument for attacking world poverty, extending ideas from his 1971 essay, Famine, Affluence and Morality. Certainly the facts are indisputable, and the logic crisp.

Singer begins with the evocative image of a drowning child you encounter. Obviously you will save the child, no matter the trivial inconveniences to yourself. The calculus here is clear, but the emotional vignette is simply a tool for Singer, an instantiation of a system where empathy for one's fellow human extends outward without bound. If Archimedes declared he could move the world with a lever, so Peter Singer extends the long arm of ethical reasoning where few dare to go. But he is not the first.

Two thousand years ago there were many philosophical schools in China. The pragmatic Confucians and the Machiavellian Legalists are well known, but the followers of Mozi are obscure. While the Legalists focused on the interests of the state embodied in the autocrat, Mozi's acolytes espoused universal love of one's fellow man with no distinction. In contrast, though the Confucians accepted the need for virtues which the Legalists dismissed, unlike Mozi they were realists, not rationalists. The Confucian worldview accepted that humans manifest grades of affection, beginning with the family.

Peter Singer's calculus, hinged around laudable general aims such as reducing pain, is blind to nature's ends, and therefore our moral sentiments perceive his spare utilitarianism as profoundly alien. Because of the logic of reproductive fitness it is almost certainly the case that our species' is riddled with miserable late-life pain so as to optimise fertility early on. Our empathy is fixed upon those near and dear because these are the individuals who may aid us in surviving so as to reproduce to the next generation. Confucius may not have been familiar with the algebra of kin selection or reciprocal altruism, but the customs and traditions which he promoted accepted the reality of human nature. Mozi failed, and was forgotten, while the teachings of Confucius served as the foundations of Chinese civilisation for over two milennia.

Confucianism's success was not due to singular genius. Rather than cleverness, its secret was common sense. Confucius began with obvious truths about how humans are, rather than declaring how we should be. Similarly, even if the selfishness of Adam Smith's industrious capitalist leaves a bit to be desired in romantic means, it remains a fact that this individual impulse has ushered in an age of mass affluence where billions no longer live in poverty as its end. An appeal to the better angels of our nature must not dismiss our concrete impulses as aberrations, now superseded by a superior abstract system. History teaches us that such blindness is folly, and many more drowning children are saved by thoughtless human impulse than studied reflection.